6 ms·

All-electric passenger ferry to be built in New Zealand

43 points by prostoalex 8y ago

xte 8y ago
Few note in today's "electric fever": - since few (not so few) years all mid-size/large boat thrusters are electric, normally powered by combustible oil generators, they have replaced expensive diesel engines used in the past; - we know very well how simple and effective an electric engine is, unfortunately we also know how hard is storing electricity. Long story short IMO all these "battery-based electrical vehicles", ferry, plane etc included are simple stupid engineering games or marketing moves until we found an affordable way to store electricity enough. Also people should take into account that we use petrol not only as an energy source but also for plastic, witch include nearly anything from electrical insulation to packaging solution and we do not have real/more environmental friendly alternatives for most of these uses. That's of course does not means that we have to keep going with petrol, but means that we need far more research before doing real move. In the meantime people should consider in terms of pollution how many emissions they can produce building modern, small, insulated homes (reducing both steel usage that it's a real problem today since we are really start to fall short and HVAC/heating power consumption), consider that we can use alcohol and methane for car and small vehicle power in general, they produce both far less pollutants than petrol/diesel fuel.
- r00fus 8y ago
  Storing electricity isn’t that difficult if you have a known route and capacity.
  - xte 8y ago
    Ok, I add a small thing: storing electricity on vehicles/ships/planes etc, so anywhere we can't create a big dam in a nearby high mountains...
    - kiwidrew 8y ago
      An electricity grid does a pretty good job of connecting reservoirs in the high mountains with distant cities and other loads. Granted there are some transmission inefficiencies, but still far better overall efficiency than any heat engine can manage. Unpredictable rainfall (e.g. extended droughts brought on by climate change) is the biggest risk factor when hydroelectricity dominates a country's energy supply. New Zealand is a good example of this: in some winters there isn't enough storage in the lakes [due to a lack of rainfall] and wholesale electricity prices spike dramatically.
      - xte 8y ago
        We talk about vehicles, boat, airplane, so moving objects, not connectable to any grid at least in an acceptable/feasible manner. That's the problem, certainly not electricity for buildings!
- woodandsteel 8y ago
  >Long story short IMO all these "battery-based electrical vehicles", ferry, plane etc included are simple stupid engineering games or marketing moves until we found an affordable way to store electricity enough Correct, but you failed (intentionally?) to note that now we have. More specifically, every year the proportion of the totality of vehicles becomes a logical target for elctrification grows larger. Would you really dispute that? >consider that we can use alcohol and methane for car and small vehicle power in general, they produce both far less pollutants than petrol/diesel fuel. The day has passed when that would be better option than electrification. >In the meantime people should consider in terms of pollution how many emissions they can produce building modern, small, insulated homes (reducing both steel usage that it's a real problem today since we are really start to fall short and HVAC/heating power consumption) Why can't we do both?
  - xte 8y ago
    I do not failed to notice the commercial and political push toward battery-based EVs, I do not notice that they can be sustained in the mean and long run. We can't produce and dispose enough battery to electrify our personal vehicle only at country-scale, we can't produce and distribute enough energy to charge them. Consider that at a certain scale we can do tons of things, but only at a certain, limited, scale. In Germany hydraulic-propellers for trains are still fairly common, they are super-duper complex to design and maintain but they was pushed as a flag of excellent German industry decades ago and they have them even if are monsters and does not really scale nor offer any practical advantage. In the '60s Italian Ansaldo have designed and build electric planes with electricity generator inside the fuselage, they fly well but they can move around half the load of the correspondent classic-design plane and they cost more, another Italian industry, Fiat, have built personal cars with a jet-mini-turbine engine as a power generator + electric motors, they works however they are so noisy, they eject too much heat, they consume so much fuel that they simply drop it. The fact that we can do something it does not means automatically that it's a good things to do nor that can scale. We can save enormous resources and improve our lives building energy-efficient houses so it's a good move, we can't for now produce electric vehicles so we have to research (a forgotten thing in managerial-era) but not try to push something we know can't scale.
thinkloop 8y ago
"Southern Hemisphere" is an irrelevant non-interesting click-baity qualifier here. "Johnson just set the world-record fastest pitch ever! against an eastern conference team on an odd calendar day during an avocado price crisis"
- smcl 8y ago
  Well perhaps to you, but if you're an aspiring engineer in New Zealand or Australia it can be quite good and inspirational to be reminded that modern tech isn't just something that happens on the other side of the world.
  - disordinary 8y ago
    Not just something that happens on the other side of the world but even just retaining knowledge. In Wellington we replaced out NZ built electric trains with ones made in Korea, and our NZ made electric busses with ones made in China. So it's good to see this sort of manufacturing knowledge return to the city
- petecox 8y ago
  > Southern Hemisphere" is an irrelevant non-interesting click-baity qualifier here. Sigh. Not everyone is blessed to be have been born in the southern hemisphere, it seems. As a resident of the big island to NZ's west, it is welcome news, particularly juxtaposed with my own government's lagging response to climate change, in a pacific region with many low lying island nations. Having personally caught ferries in Australia and Chile, as well as between the border of Argentina and Uruguay, I reflect then on how each nation's carbon footprint could be reduced by adopting such technology.
  - oh_sigh 8y ago
    But why? Do you feel you have more in common with Mozambique and Argentina than you do with England and the US because of your location?
    - 8y ago
boznz 8y ago
Small steps :-)
Someone 8y ago
For those wondering: the first was http://fjellstrand.no/flyers/flyer_1696.pdf http://fjellstrand.no/flyers/flyer_1696.pdf (2015) Quite a bit larger than the NZ one (4 times the length) , about a MW of power (max), and, reading https://electrek.co/2018/02/03/all-electric-ferry-cuts-emission-cost/ https://electrek.co/2018/02/03/all-electric-ferry-cuts-emiss..., about a MWh of battery capacity. This isn’t built for long distances, but a good first step.
- Gibbon1 8y ago
  This is also interesting, Sweden is converting it's two large ferry's to battery electric as well. https://electrek.co/2017/08/24/all-electric-ferries-abb/ https://electrek.co/2017/08/24/all-electric-ferries-abb/ These aren't small ships, 10,000 tons.
jakewins 8y ago
Visiting family this Christmas, I was happy to see the ferry line that connects Sweden and Denmark has retrofitted their fleet, so they are now all-electric. The ferries are automatically recharged by a robotic system at each port while they are loaded, it's pretty neat. http://sailwiththecurrent.com/ http://sailwiththecurrent.com/

43 points by prostoalex 8y ago

xte 8y ago

Few note in today's "electric fever": - since few (not so few) years all mid-size/large boat thrusters are electric, normally powered by combustible oil generators, they have replaced expensive diesel engines used in the past; - we know very well how simple and effective an electric engine is, unfortunately we also know how hard is storing electricity. Long story short IMO all these "battery-based electrical vehicles", ferry, plane etc included are simple stupid engineering games or marketing moves until we found an affordable way to store electricity enough. Also people should take into account that we use petrol not only as an energy source but also for plastic, witch include nearly anything from electrical insulation to packaging solution and we do not have real/more environmental friendly alternatives for most of these uses. That's of course does not means that we have to keep going with petrol, but means that we need far more research before doing real move. In the meantime people should consider in terms of pollution how many emissions they can produce building modern, small, insulated homes (reducing both steel usage that it's a real problem today since we are really start to fall short and HVAC/heating power consumption), consider that we can use alcohol and methane for car and small vehicle power in general, they produce both far less pollutants than petrol/diesel fuel.

r00fus 8y ago
Storing electricity isn’t that difficult if you have a known route and capacity.
- xte 8y ago
  Ok, I add a small thing: storing electricity on vehicles/ships/planes etc, so anywhere we can't create a big dam in a nearby high mountains...
  - kiwidrew 8y ago
    An electricity grid does a pretty good job of connecting reservoirs in the high mountains with distant cities and other loads. Granted there are some transmission inefficiencies, but still far better overall efficiency than any heat engine can manage. Unpredictable rainfall (e.g. extended droughts brought on by climate change) is the biggest risk factor when hydroelectricity dominates a country's energy supply. New Zealand is a good example of this: in some winters there isn't enough storage in the lakes [due to a lack of rainfall] and wholesale electricity prices spike dramatically.
    - xte 8y ago
      We talk about vehicles, boat, airplane, so moving objects, not connectable to any grid at least in an acceptable/feasible manner. That's the problem, certainly not electricity for buildings!
woodandsteel 8y ago
>Long story short IMO all these "battery-based electrical vehicles", ferry, plane etc included are simple stupid engineering games or marketing moves until we found an affordable way to store electricity enough Correct, but you failed (intentionally?) to note that now we have. More specifically, every year the proportion of the totality of vehicles becomes a logical target for elctrification grows larger. Would you really dispute that? >consider that we can use alcohol and methane for car and small vehicle power in general, they produce both far less pollutants than petrol/diesel fuel. The day has passed when that would be better option than electrification. >In the meantime people should consider in terms of pollution how many emissions they can produce building modern, small, insulated homes (reducing both steel usage that it's a real problem today since we are really start to fall short and HVAC/heating power consumption) Why can't we do both?
- xte 8y ago
  I do not failed to notice the commercial and political push toward battery-based EVs, I do not notice that they can be sustained in the mean and long run. We can't produce and dispose enough battery to electrify our personal vehicle only at country-scale, we can't produce and distribute enough energy to charge them. Consider that at a certain scale we can do tons of things, but only at a certain, limited, scale. In Germany hydraulic-propellers for trains are still fairly common, they are super-duper complex to design and maintain but they was pushed as a flag of excellent German industry decades ago and they have them even if are monsters and does not really scale nor offer any practical advantage. In the '60s Italian Ansaldo have designed and build electric planes with electricity generator inside the fuselage, they fly well but they can move around half the load of the correspondent classic-design plane and they cost more, another Italian industry, Fiat, have built personal cars with a jet-mini-turbine engine as a power generator + electric motors, they works however they are so noisy, they eject too much heat, they consume so much fuel that they simply drop it. The fact that we can do something it does not means automatically that it's a good things to do nor that can scale. We can save enormous resources and improve our lives building energy-efficient houses so it's a good move, we can't for now produce electric vehicles so we have to research (a forgotten thing in managerial-era) but not try to push something we know can't scale.

thinkloop 8y ago

"Southern Hemisphere" is an irrelevant non-interesting click-baity qualifier here. "Johnson just set the world-record fastest pitch ever! against an eastern conference team on an odd calendar day during an avocado price crisis"

smcl 8y ago
Well perhaps to you, but if you're an aspiring engineer in New Zealand or Australia it can be quite good and inspirational to be reminded that modern tech isn't just something that happens on the other side of the world.
- disordinary 8y ago
  Not just something that happens on the other side of the world but even just retaining knowledge. In Wellington we replaced out NZ built electric trains with ones made in Korea, and our NZ made electric busses with ones made in China. So it's good to see this sort of manufacturing knowledge return to the city
petecox 8y ago
> Southern Hemisphere" is an irrelevant non-interesting click-baity qualifier here. Sigh. Not everyone is blessed to be have been born in the southern hemisphere, it seems. As a resident of the big island to NZ's west, it is welcome news, particularly juxtaposed with my own government's lagging response to climate change, in a pacific region with many low lying island nations. Having personally caught ferries in Australia and Chile, as well as between the border of Argentina and Uruguay, I reflect then on how each nation's carbon footprint could be reduced by adopting such technology.
- oh_sigh 8y ago
  But why? Do you feel you have more in common with Mozambique and Argentina than you do with England and the US because of your location?
  - 8y ago

boznz 8y ago

Small steps :-)

Someone 8y ago

For those wondering: the first was http://fjellstrand.no/flyers/flyer_1696.pdf http://fjellstrand.no/flyers/flyer_1696.pdf (2015) Quite a bit larger than the NZ one (4 times the length) , about a MW of power (max), and, reading https://electrek.co/2018/02/03/all-electric-ferry-cuts-emission-cost/ https://electrek.co/2018/02/03/all-electric-ferry-cuts-emiss..., about a MWh of battery capacity. This isn’t built for long distances, but a good first step.

Gibbon1 8y ago
This is also interesting, Sweden is converting it's two large ferry's to battery electric as well. https://electrek.co/2017/08/24/all-electric-ferries-abb/ https://electrek.co/2017/08/24/all-electric-ferries-abb/ These aren't small ships, 10,000 tons.

jakewins 8y ago

Visiting family this Christmas, I was happy to see the ferry line that connects Sweden and Denmark has retrofitted their fleet, so they are now all-electric. The ferries are automatically recharged by a robotic system at each port while they are loaded, it's pretty neat. http://sailwiththecurrent.com/ http://sailwiththecurrent.com/